The present invention relates generally to provisioning organizational definitions and more particularly to provisioning organizational definitions in a unified messaging platform environment.
Unified messaging is the integration of multiple (typically two or more) types of communication (e.g., email, voicemail, short message service (SMS), fax, etc.) into a single, unified message store (e.g., a unified messaging platform) accessible from a variety of user devices. Unified messaging is typically provided by a service provider, which may be the same service provider that provides telephone service. In order for a service provider to provide unified messaging service to an organization of subscribers (also called users, which may be employees of a client organization), the unified messaging platform must be configured with organizational data regarding related groups in the client organization's organizational structure. Each client can be assigned his/her own unified messaging mailbox.
Conventionally, provisioning of business groups of a subscriber into the unified messaging platform is done manually using interactive software. Such software allows a client or the service provider to manually define organizational structures for the client organization in order to define mailboxes for individual users and to maintain group hierarchies in the client's organizational structure. Although this approach is effective, it requires the manual definitions of a client's organizations and groups into organizational data supported by the unified messaging platform. This can be tedious and error-prone. Moreover, manually defining such organizational data can take a long time and be operationally expensive, particularly for larger businesses and organizations. Accordingly, automatic definition of organizational data in a unified messaging platform is desirable.
A subscriber often does not desire to have multiple mailboxes, even if his/her name may appear in multiple places in the organization. A name may appear in more than one place in an organization's database due to a variety of reasons, such as, but not limited to, temporary acting positions and concurrent assignments in various groups (e.g., a temporary international assignment). Furthermore, even if desired, multiple mailboxes due to multiple instance subscriber records must be managed carefully and often manually. Such manual management is tedious, error-prone, and operationally expensive. Accordingly, automatic management of multiple instance subscriber records in a unified messaging platform is desirable.